Author: Mary Ann

There’s a first time for everything.

Thursday I was the co-MC at a rally at my State Capitol. I was there with supporters of abortion rights, and we were joined by supporters of Prop A, which 1.6 million Missourians passed into law in November to guarantee sick leave and an increased minimum wage to the 700,000 Missourians who did not have it. Our Republican supermajority legislature repealed it Wednesday night, acting against the voice of the people. We were there to speak on behalf of the disenfranchised majority of the electorate.

The organizers asked me to MC the day before — I hadn’t been planning to attend, but this felt consequential. It felt worth the sacrifice. So I cleared my schedule, wrote a speech and made the two hour drive the next morning. I loved the energy there, and there was nowhere else I wanted to be. As we waited for the rally to officially begin, one of the organizers asked if I would be willing to talk to a journalist. I said sure, and a minute later the interview was already over.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by m perkins (@map_bkk)

This wasn’t my first time at our capitol – that was in January 2024. It wasn’t my first time serving as MC or giving a prepared speech about abortion rights. I’ve been doing that all year long at our monthly meetings in my district. And while knocking on doors and phone banking, I’ve talked with so many people about the movement for abortion rights in my state. This didn’t feel like a first. It didn’t feel like a big deal. It was just one more conversation.

I wasn’t expecting anything after that — maybe a print article published on the website of our local affiliate station? But that afternoon I got one text after another from far flung friends saying they heard me on NPR. That was a first. Not bad for volunteer from the suburbs.

When I travel, I almost always take my Kehinde Wiley tote bag with me. This started on Kilimanjaro. I had a vague sense that it would be fun to have my picture taken with the tote at the summit. I wasn’t wrong. When we finally made it there, I took off my backpack and pulled out the tote bag. All of the mountain guides laughed as I slid the straps over my shoulder. “Shopping?,” they asked, chuckling.

I really love the picture my guide took.

A few weeks later I stood on the Spiral Jetty for the very first time in my life after dreaming of it and adoring it from afar for nearly 25 years. Back in the ’90s when I was an Art History undergrad, I’d learned about it. But back then the water level was much higher, so high that the jetty couldn’t be seen at all. Times change. So it happened that we were in town, and I convinced a few family members to help me find it. We drove miles and miles, first along highways and then down miles of gravel road. Eventually we found it. Mid-day sun beat down on us as we scampered over rocks and across the dried up shoreline of the Great Salt Lake.

My sister took this photo.

I’ve managed to take the tote to a few other places, too. It’s fun taking the arts everywhere.

Think about all the stuff people have made – all of it – throughout all the history of forever.

Every single tool, every item of clothing, every building, every machine, every work of art, every song and musical instrument, every single book or research study or scientific discovery. What would you say is the best out of all of everything that anyone has ever made?

I got a degree in one small slice of that vast range of production: Western Art History. I learned from my studies that throughout time, artists had tried and tried and tried some more to imitate nature, to pay homage to it, to do it justice, to show their appreciation for it by capturing it any way they could, in paint or stone or bronze. With the invention of cameras and computers, they tried that too.

But no artist, however skilled they may be – no person is going to make anything even half as amazing as a sunset, a duckling or a spring blossom. Simply, in the contest between what nature creates and what people create, nature wins.

But the question interests me anyway: what is the best thing that humanity has ever produced? Humans have made some incredible things after all. Consider the terra cotta warriors, the Taj Mahal, the Mayan and Egyptian pyramids and Stone Henge, to say nothing of modern marvels like rocket ships and cellphones. All amazing, but none of them are the best – at least not to me.

I reserve that designation for this:

It was operational by 1957. Even then, it wasn’t the biggest accelerator, but it was the only one jointly owned by the founding members. Nowadays, the Synchrocyclotron is a museum piece, which is why I was able to take a selfie with it when I visited in 2016 and took a tour.

To this day, CERN is home to the largest and most sophisticated particle collider on Earth — and the research facility is still jointly owned by a consortium of nations that cooperate in the pursuit of the furthest horizons of scientific discovery, without either a military motive or a profit motive. The research facility is always in demand, and of course, this has led to a lot of publishing.

So it’s not surprising that the researches there needed a better information management system. So they came up with a good one, so good in fact that our internet browsers have their ancestry in the referencing system developed at CERN. This just makes me love it even more.

So as I see it, CERN is the best thing that people have ever made, ever, throughout all the history of humans making things. I know of nothing else like it, and the fact of its existence makes me feel proud and happy to be alive.